Is the obsession with continuity the biggest thing holding back american comics?

If your a WWE fan and someone offers you tickets to SummerSlam do you say "Oh sorry man I missed a bunch of matches this year so I'll be too lost. Have fun without me."

If your a Toronto Raptors fan and someone offers you tickets to a game do you say, "I can't go, I'm watching every single Raptors game ever played and I'm only at the late 90's now. If I go see them now I'll be totally lost."

Checked, the only counter argument I'd pose is sports tend to have a pretty deep history that requires some back team knowledge to fully appreciate the match. Rivalries and etc. Marvel movies have become sports games, you get more out of them with the backstory but it is entertaining fluff on own.

This,

Also a shared universe will castrated crceative potential of the writer and company owned titles/characters will ensure decades of satus quo. The main reasons why manga is better

This. It’s assblasted weebs and new readers who have this obsession with continuity. Pic related.

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>Also a shared universe will castrated crceative potential of the writer

That's the excuse they used back in the 00's to ignore continuity Two decades later and we find out it was a load of bullshit. Bad writers still ended up remaining bad writers.

That's barely even trivia, and has zero impact on the games, teams, rosters, and play itself.

I will never claim that no restrains will sudently make a bad writer good, but it will definitely make the good ones more free and they work more diverse.

In terms of the Big 2, they're not "only allowing" the 1960s books to keep existing, it's their audience not supporting newer characters and books enough to keep them in publication. And that's not a continuity or status quo problem, it's comics failing to come up with new characters as popular as the old ones.

>it's comics failing to come up with new characters as popular as the old ones.

The characters are only the tip of the iceberg, the fact that even aa new sharacter needs to be part of their shared universe and fits the marvel/DC flavor will forever ensure anything you can publish will be a existing generic superhero with a new paintjob. to make it simple the big 2 suck because they don't want anything new, they want to keep doing the same thing for another 50+ years.

>The characters are only the tip of the iceberg, the fact that even aa new sharacter needs to be part of their shared universe and fits the marvel/DC flavor will forever ensure anything you can publish will be a existing generic superhero with a new paintjob.
They "need" to be part of the shared universe to have any chance at catching reader's attention in the first place. Alternate universes are often dismissed as irrelevant even when using the actual established characters, and often outright ignored when you're talking about new characters.

Comics' audience is just too limited to attempt to launch something completely new nowadays, and other factors like price, distribution and general culture making expanding that audience in a significant way basically impossible.

This is just sad, how things got like this?

Poor long-term responses to changing market and economic conditions. For all that people love to point to specific things like the direct market or loss of newsstands, it's actually a confluence of events going all the way back to the 40s combined with decisions that were, at the time, completely logical and successful moves.

This user gets it. Back when readership for comics was measured in millions, you could afford to have an entire team pumping out new comics every month while only charging pocket money per issue. Experimental titles were a good idea, since you never knew what might take off. These days even the big name legacy titles sell less than 200,000 issues each month. Even with the increased price, they still make far more money off of licensing and merchandise. So unless a comic already has a large fanbase ready to consume merch, the big names have little reason to invest into it.

Outside of smaller comic publishers and indies, you won't see any changes in the status quo until more people start buying comics again. With sites like readcomicsonline, that's not likely to happen. Outside of collectors and people wanting to keep their hobby alive, most casual readers would rather read the full comic online for free than go to their local comic shop and buy the comic one issue at a time for $4-5 or more a pop. Diamond never helped matters any by forcing the shops to be overloaded with new issues and pushing the cheaper backissues away from visitors.

There's two ways out, but neither will end well.

Its inferior writers feeling jealous of past, better writers, and how the only way their shit stories get any recognition is if they reference better stories.

The hard truth is that these guys suck regardless whether they try to pay attention to continuity.

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That was what Didio tried to do. He kept Western and war and Kirby inspired comics going for as long as he could. And despite some of them being the best comics coming out, nobody bought them. Marvel also did a bunch of mini and maxiseries about newspaper reporters. And I remember a weird one about fashion where the covers had Marvel characters posing like it was some gossip magazine.

That was also from Bendis, the least creative asshole in the industry.

The problem with this post is that by it's own admission Golden and early Silver Age comics were written by the second type of writers is excoriates. It also ignores that most comic writers and artists have always had alternate work, and that the career/company man in comics didn't really show up until the 70s and 80s once payment and royalty practices shifted.

Continuity is fine though. What holds American comics back is status quo.

i'm pretty sure Bendis was quoting I wanna say Wolfman with that line about continuity shackling the best writer to the worst

DC tends to put more effort into it, but for the most part you really only seen widescale experimentation during reboots and line relaunches because they can count on the speculator market boosting sales to not make those kids of books dead in the water on release. The overwhelming prevalence of capes is also something of a recent phenomenon, as both Marvel and DC had pretty large slates of non-cape or cape-adjacent books well into the early 90s.